


if you have nightmares, we’ll dance on the bed

by mayflowers07



Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Fear, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Amputation, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Nightmares, Okay i think that’s good enough?, Panic Attacks, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Relationships, Team as Family, ahhhh how does one tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29186124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayflowers07/pseuds/mayflowers07
Summary: The Hermitcraft crew really was a chaotic group. Each person came from a unique background, with a unique reason why they left their old life behind and elected to join the team. They all had pasts they’d rather forget, pasts that often came to haunt them as nightmares. This is an exploration of how some of the Hermits cope with those nightmares.(Takes place in the Space Outlaws AU created by martuzzio over on Tumblr. You can probably read the fic without knowing the AU, but I can imagine it would be a bit confusing lol)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), only found family dynamics here because I am predictable
Comments: 27
Kudos: 96





	if you have nightmares, we’ll dance on the bed

It was Zedaph who started his tradition for nightmares with Tango and Impulse. His pack animal instincts meant he was always very social with his family, not holding back any emotions whether positive or negative. So when Zed began waking up after long, never ending nightmares where Tango and Impulse were truly dead forever, and Zed was left to wither away without his pack, drowning in his grief and loneliness, he automatically began seeking his family out. Of course both Tango and Impulse were more than willing to hold Zedaph while he slept to soothe his fears. 

And if they both began adopting the habit as well? If it wasn’t uncommon for Tango to crawl into Impulse’s bed sobbing because he dreamt about abandoning Zedaph to die, or Impulse to shake Zedaph awake with the memory of watching Tango’s escape pod explode and thinking Tango had died stuck in his mind? If the rest of the ship began getting used to waking up to see all three of them piled into one bed in a tangle of limbs, holding each other as close as they could? 

Well, that was just a natural progression of events.

… 

Doc couldn’t dream. He didn’t even know what dreaming felt like. It was an odd topic he found himself confessing to Grian one day over a long flight to negotiations on a distant planet. Creepers barely needed to sleep more than three or four hours a night, more a dormant state then true sleep like humans, and they didn’t dream while they slept at all. With Doc’s extra bionic enhancements as well, he found himself rarely needing more than an hour or two of sleep to feel fully rested. Doc was hesitant to admit that maybe deep down he hated how different his sleep habits were from most of the rest of the crew because it reminded him of how lonely it sometimes was to be the only creature like him in the whole universe- how inhuman and monstrous he was. 

But when Doc’s time spent awake while most others slept meant he was the one to gently bandage Bdubs’ hand after he lashed out during a nightmare and broke a lamp, when it meant he was the one to talk Etho down from a panic attack as whatever horrors in his mysterious past haunted him, when it meant he was the one to find Beef exhaustedly stress baking and coax him back to sleep with soft words reserved only for the other members of the NHO - Doc found he didn’t mind his sleep habits all that much.

… 

False coped with her nightmares the way she always coped with all her feelings: fighting. It had become unfortunately common for the crew to wake for the day only to see False in the training arena tearing through practice bots with her usually controlled precision, knowing she had probably been going at it for most of the night with no rest. Xisuma had once attempted to keep her from wearing herself out by blocking her access to the arena at night, but that only resulted in her tearing apart the access panel in the wall to break in. 

Soon another solution came to False’s unstable night habits. Whenever Stress or Ren had nightmares, they would go visit False during her combat practice. And of course False would instantly drop her compulsive training to help her friends, to listen to Ren whimper and cry as he described his past terror as he had watched his brother slowly starve to death while they lived in poverty or to listen to Stress detachedly, almost-numbly describe a corpse with long flowing red hair blinking its dead eyes up at Stress and boring into her soul. 

And along the way, the setup turned mutually beneficial as False found it easier to also confess to her friends her nightmares of falling in battle and letting the other Hermits get killed like she had her older, long-gone friends in a rebellion years ago that was set to fail.

… 

Everyone on the crew knew what Keralis’ nightmares looked like- well, sounded like was more accurate. It had only happened once, but no one could really forget the night that everyone woke up to an ear splitting scream of agony and terror carving through the ship. Technology around the vessel sputtered out and died as the sound waves knocked loose wires and other mechanical parts, all of the Hermits were left temporarily deaf for a few days, both of Keralis’ closest neighbours- Joe and Mumbo- ended up going unconscious from the excruciating pain, and Jevin was stuck in the medbay for a week as the vibrations ripped apart his fragile semi-solid body. 

The event was devastating, most of all for a very guilty-feeling Keralis, but luckily it had never been repeated. Many of the Hermits believed that Keralis just never suffered from the same nightmare again, but those like Xisuma and Bdubs who knew their friend better than that could see the traces of blood on Keralis’ lips where he bit them and the gouges along his arms where he scratched his nails in a desperate attempt to keep quiet after jolting wake from the nightmares.

… 

It was only natural for Cub and Scar to be the one to comfort each other after rough nights. No one truly knew what the pair had gone through under Convex’s tyranny other than each other. 

At first a few of the Hermits had a misguided belief that only Scar suffered from nightmares. He was more vocal about his issues, even taking pain medication and sleeping pills from Stress when he admitted that a lot of the times what woke him up was phantom pain in his nonexistent legs, the memory of being awake as Convex painstakingly cut them off too unbearable to sleep through. But even though Cub was quieter about his issues didn’t mean they didn’t exist. 

After years of friendship, Cub knew exactly what to say to a sobbing Scar to convince him that what happened with Bad wasn’t his fault and exactly how to hold him so that Scar couldn’t deliriously claw in pain at the stubs where his legs were cut off. And vice versa- Scar knew exactly how to ground Cub after nightmares of being “punished” by Convex for not being productive enough left him dissociated and retreated into his own mind and what to tell Cub to convince him that all of the innocent blood slain by Convex while he worked with them wasn't his fault.

…

It took a while for xB’s trauma to really come to light and start impacting him. While he was on the run from every authority in the galaxy all hunting his head for the accusations of genocide he was stuck with, he never really had the time nor the mental capacity to process and cope with the issues that arose from the constant fear and stress from fleeing the many people calling for his death, from the guilt of what happened to the planet and the million lost on it, and the grief of losing his old life and everything he held dear. 

It was only after joining the Hermitcraft crew that his PTSD reared its ugly head. His triggers were random. One day he’d be perfectly fine, the next he’d be having panic attacks over the sound of police sirens in a movie or the sight of mushrooms and spores on a foreign planet. It was frustrating to no end, he explained one night to Hypno after the man caught him swimming laps around the ship’s pool to calm down after a particularly bad nightmare. It was frustrating because he was finally in a safe environment, finally free of the constant threats of persecution he had once been suffering from, but instead of feeling good and enjoying life he was stuck feeling so much worse. 

Although when Hypno hugged him close and explained that healing would take time and that himself and the other Hermits would all be behind him while he took that time, he did feel a small bit better about himself.

… 

Similar to xB’s situation was Mumbo’s. See, Mumbo didn’t really have a lot of issues before joining the Hermitcraft ship. Maybe the occasional long night awake due to insomnia from his anxiety, but that was pretty much the worst it got. 

But then he saw Wels dragging Iskall’s mangled, barely-alive body onto the ship after a mission gone wrong. But then he was left holding a screaming, delirious Grian begging and crying for someone named Taurtis to come back and not leave him. But then he got sucked into mission after mission where he saw violence and bloodshed like he had never even imagined before in his old life. 

So it was only after he had joined the crew that Mumbo began waking up with barely held back screams from nightmares he struggled to let go of. At first, he didn’t want to talk to his friends about what was happening, because he didn’t feel like he deserved to compare his issues with theirs that seemed so much worse. But when a worried Grian and Iskall cornered him and mentioned that he was looking very tired and they were getting concerned, he didn’t really have a choice as he broke down in tears and confessed how bad his anxiety had gotten. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing though as the two of them quickly pulled him into a group hug and comforted him until his worries seemed small.

… 

Cleo didn’t sleep. At all. Her body would go through periods of fatigue and exhaustion where she would have to rest and relax to regain her energy, but she didn’t feel the same pull to sleep she had when she was awake. Cleo never really knew why- the biology behind her miraculous resurrection was too complicated for any besides the most advanced scientists to understand- and the one woman on the ship who could probably answer that question was the one who resurrected Cleo in the first place. Talk about awkward. 

So Cleo didn’t really suffer from nightmares- not in the normal way. It was one night while chatting with Joe about his horrible dreams of watching his daughter grow up and forget about her father because he was always absent that Cleo brought up her dreams. How in moments of tiredness or distraction, when daydreaming and letting her mind wonder, Cleo would find herself seeing and hearing awful things she never remembered experiencing, like lying on an examination table and being prodded open by scalpels and needles and knives like a piece of meat at the butchers shop. Joe pondered that maybe it was memories of Cleo’s time in between her two lives, while the corporation was trying to bring her back. 

Regardless of what it was Cleo was fairly sure she didn’t really want to remember any of it.

…

TFC had a system. After decades of fighting and running and traveling, he had found that the system was the best way for both his physical and mental health to deal with his issues. Every night he woke up grieving his losses, he would slowly get up and pull on his prosthetic leg. Then he’d quietly make his way through the ship: 

past Impulse’s room where Tango and Zedaph had declared an impromptu sleepover, 

past the kitchens where Doc, Etho, and Beef shared a drink or two and talked about adventures long gone, 

past the general sitting area where Ren played gentle lullabies on his guitar as Stress braided back False’s hair, 

past the game room where Keralis and Bdubs hollered at each other over a video game Bdubs was losing badly at, 

past the robotics laboratory where Cub tinkered with various drones while Scar talked about everything and nothing while tossing a toy around for Jellie to play with, 

past the gymnasium where Iskall and Grian went back and forth sparring against each other while Mumbo kept score,

past the swimming pool where Wels insisted on a race against xB he would obviously lose and Hypno tried to convince Jevin it was a very bad idea for the slime to get into the hot tub, 

and past the library where Joe and Cleo read through centuries old textbooks and historical recounts in amiable silence.

TFC would walk past them all, smiling at his family and their various shenanigans before eventually reaching his goal- a huge watchpoint window taking up an entire wall of the front of the ship for viewing purposes. Because there TFC would always find Xisuma, sitting completely still like a billions of year old statue and watching the vast nothingness of space flow by. TFC would sit beside his old friend that only he knew suffered from nightmares worse than everyone else on the ship, not saying a word, and just watch as time went by at its ever-crawling pace.

Because if anyone understood TFC’s fears of losing time, of blinking your eyes for a moment only to open them and see that everyone and everything you’ve ever loved is gone, lost in the fabric of time to never be seen again, it was Xisuma himself. So the two would find companionship in the familiar quiet of space ushering the hours past.

**Author's Note:**

> Again this is based on the Space Outlaws AU by martuzzio on Tumblr. Here’s a link to her blog- https://martuzzio.tumblr.com
> 
> This AU is absolutely amazing. The art is fantastic, the characters are very cool, and the world building is excellent. I can not recommend enough that you go check it out. 
> 
> Also I know I should be working on the next part of ‘i can be the one you call’ and I promise I am if you’re here from that, it’s just that creative inspiration has been alluding me for a while, so please enjoy this fic to maybe make up for my lack of content lol.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [How to Make Slime Soup](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29209623) by [Fintastica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fintastica/pseuds/Fintastica)




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